


tried not to do it

by louis_quatorze



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Daddy Issues, Lars Gottlieb Being a Dick, M/M, Pre-Movie: Pacific Rim (2013), Pre-Slash, they fuck you up your mum and dad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-21
Updated: 2018-05-21
Packaged: 2019-05-09 18:46:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14721584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/louis_quatorze/pseuds/louis_quatorze
Summary: The PPDC announces that they will close the Jaeger Program, and Hermann has a revelation.





	tried not to do it

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to the Discord for all your encouragement. Title from the Pet Shop Boys.

He found Hermann in the lab, leaning heavily against his desk and staring at the chalkboards. The lights were half on and Hermann looked exhausted, even by the standards of these last few months. Newt couldn’t blame him. The meeting was rough, and it wasn’t his father on the other end of the conference table.

“Hermann?” Newt asked quietly, figuring it would be a good idea to at least alert Hermann that he’d been found. 

Hermann didn’t turn around, focus kept on his equations. After a few moments, Newt turned to go – despite what Hermann always said, he wasn’t so completely insensitive that he didn’t know when he wasn’t needed. 

“I thought he was infallible, you know.”

Newt stopped, turned around. Hermann was still looking at his equations. “Hmm?”

“My father. I always…he is a brilliant man. I always knew that.” Hermann sighed heavily. “He was always right.” 

This was, perhaps, more than Newt was prepared to deal with. He had been expecting Hermann’s regular prissy sort of rage, the pushed-over notes and old-fashioned threats of Hermann Gottlieb when he was thwarted, notorious throughout the entire K-science division. Hermann had looked furious enough in the meeting, and Newt, when he’d gone off to look for him, had assumed he’d find something wrecked. Not Hermann this quiet, this pensive. 

“Rough, man,” Newt said, unsure of exactly what to say.

“He is a genius, and he knows best.” Hermann looked down at the head of the cane in his hand, twirling it idly back and forth in front of him. “It has never occurred to me that he could, ever, be wrong.”

Newt moved closer, coming up next to him in front of those towering chalkboards Hermann liked despite their absolute archaicness. He wasn’t sure that Hermann even noticed him, not properly, that it was him and not just someone to speak at. Newt supposed it didn’t matter. 

“I may not have always understood why he did things, but that was my fault. Not his.” Hermann was looking at the equations again, squinting like he expected to find something else in them. “One never asked Dr. Lars Gottlieb why.” 

Newt tried to imagine it. He had his own parental issues – his mother had basically abandoned him, of course he did – but his father had always been so open, so willing to answer questions, to admit when he just didn’t know. Some of Newt’s fondest memories revolved around just that, his father helping him type questions into that old Encarta CD-ROM or taking him to the library when those answers weren’t good enough, weren’t detailed enough for Newt’s curiosity to be satisfied. His father always encouraged him to question. Deep down, it was why Newt thought he became a scientist. That feeling of asking, of discovery. 

“Does that mean we’re losing you to the Wall?” Newt asked, the question coming out not as sarcastically as he’d intended.

Hermann fixed him with a glare, the classic withering Gottlieb stare, familiar to everyone in the division and to Newt most of all. It was, he had to admit, not too far off from the look of the man in the conference room when they’d started raising objections, and if he hadn’t known that the other Dr. Gottlieb was Hermann’s father by looks or reputation than he would have known by that. “No,” Hermann said sharply, crisply, more like himself. “The Wall is an absolutely foolish idea. There is no way it will maintain, no matter what materials we enforce it with. With the rate the Kaiju are growing, the speed of it – no. The numbers do not lie. My father is simply…wrong.”

The word hung in the air. 

The energy left Hermann and he seemed to deflate, turning back to the chalkboards. “He is wrong.”

It felt momentous, and Newt was terrible with momentous. “Yeah,” he said, a little too quickly, shifting his weight back and forth. “Like…it’s definitely pretty stupid, yeah? Like, kaiju are definitely adapting, if you compare something like Knifehead to Taranais, it’s pretty obvious to see that there is some kind of intentional shift, and –“

“I’m not sure I would call it intentional.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Gottlieb – “

“But the general sense is supported by my calculations.” 

“Calculations? What the hell does calculations have to do with this? Evolution has nothing to do with calculations, it’s about trial and error and making things work, and it's obvious that– “ 

“They are exponential, it is basic mathematical – “ Hermann bit off his response, as if he realized that he was starting yet another argument with Newt instead of having whatever crisis he was having. “Regardless.”

“Yeah.” Hermann was looking at the cane in his hands, lashes swept across his cheek. He looked like his father. It was unfortunate. Newt had always wished he looked more like his, was more obviously Jacob’s when they stood together, while Hermann’s lineage was writ clearly on his face. He was undoubtedly the son of Lars Gottlieb. 

“He always disliked you,” Hermann said quietly. “Immensely.”

Newt laughed before he could hold it back. “What?”

“When we were writing.” Hermann looked back at the chalkboards, as awkward as he had ever been, twisting the head of his cane back and forth. “He disapproved of you.”

“Good,” Newt responded, grinning as Hermann glared at him. “What?” It had been years, and Hermann had never brought up the letters, not when they’d been sent to Hong Kong, not when they were in the lab or the mess hall or any situation that they had been thrown together in. Mostly, they argued, with a quick snap that Newt relished, a game of one-upmanship that he found unbearably exciting. They sometimes had coffee, late at night when no one was else around. He wasn’t sure where he stood with Hermann. He remembered every letter. 

“He thought you were…undignified. With wild theories, unsuited for serious work. A dilettante.” Hermann pressed his lips together, not quite a smile. “We argued about it. About you. And then I met you, in Stockholm…”

“Hermann – “ Newt didn’t want to be reminded of Stockholm. He’d been so anxious about finally meeting Hermann, and he was young and stupid, so he’d had a few drinks and thought that the best way to impress him was to demonstrate how cool and popular he was. He’d tried to show off, drop the names of people he knew, how brilliant they all thought he was, and had, like an idiot, doubled down on it the more he saw Hermann’s face distort and fall. Hermann had avoided him for the rest of the conference. It was, without a doubt, the most humiliating experience of his life, and he’d been humiliated a lot. 

“And it seemed he was correct. Again.” 

“Yeah. Well.” Newt scratched his arm, right over the head of Yamarashi, one of his regular nervous tics when he didn’t know what else to do. “Seemed?”

“Well.” Hermann smiled at Newt. Tightly, a little pained, but Newt would take it. “It turns out my father can be wrong.”


End file.
